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They hear the upstairs shower running for half an hour every night. Hers is a curiously inhuman odor, strong and sterile, like that of mushrooms, which makes its way through the aura of bleach and cheap shampoo. "Probably a meta- bolic imbalance," says Lili, who plans to suggest delicately that the poor girl see a specialist. I f Orso is bored by maids, it is in the familiar, indulgent way that a man can be bored by sisters or female cousins, or ex-girlfriends who have become plump and unattractive. The fact is that the fITst cunt he ever saw belonged to a maid- Ida, who worked for his family in Padua when he was twelve. "Saw" is the cru- cial word; it was an unusually clinical, almost academic type of viewing. Ida, without underpants, perched precariously; legs askew, on the edge of the kitchen table, as Orso's brother, Remo, a year older, declaimed in a pompous, peda- gogic tone: "Questa, caro mio, è fa flcd'- "This, Orso, my boy, is the puss " Remo couldn't actually have had a schoolmas- ter's pointer, yet he was indicating with enough fonnality to suggest one: labia majora, labia minora, mons pubis, cli- toris. Was he consulting a medical dic- tionary at the same time? It was possible. And leaning back on her elbows, gig- gling shameless encouragement in her singsong Friulano accent, was beautiful, brainless Ida, tall and blond and long- necked, with a head that looked as small , as a goose s. Describing the scene to his lovers over the years, Orso has romanticized what he saw between Idàs legs as a rose, pink-lipped and crimson in its depths, and has added a swirling frame of old- fashioned petticoats-when in fact the girl wore a coverall of postwar cut that squashed her thighs grotesquely when pulled up. What he really thought It looked like was a sea creature-edged with pale moss or cilia and exuding a mollusk's imperturbable smugness. An impression that was hardly dispelled a few evenings later when, much to Remo's chagrin, Orso was the one pulled down onto Idàs small hard bed, after she had invited him to her room to deliver some old copies of Corriere dei Piccoli, the children's weekly she used to read with her lips moving after washing the din- ner dishes. "Poor thing." This was the comment of Anne, Orso's American second wife, the mother of his children, who was quick to take up the cause of any woman against him. "What do you mean, poor thing'? It was all Idàs idea to start with. She was eighteen or nineteen-and no virgin. A good housekeeper and a great cook, too. Nobody could make knoederli like hers. And she ended up fine. Married a cara- biniere and came to my mother's funeral in a mink coat." "Poor thing." This was Bettina, Orso's great love, who, throughout their six- year affair, stayed married to his busi- ness partner, Grellio. "I bet she didn't re- ally have petticoats like a cancan dancer. Sounds too much like Belle Epoque pornography to me. And why did your mother hire a slut like that?" "She was a brilliant laundress. Could get through my mother's entire trous- seau of linen and hemp sheets and my father's shirts in a single da And I think they expected her to relieve Remo and me of our virginio/ That's what bour- geois families did in those days. So we wouldn't end up homosexual." "Poor thing." This was Sveva, the twenty-two-year-old assistant accoun- tant in Orso's office, with whom he occasionally sneaks off for a weekend. "So typical of men of your generation. You've all got a proto-Fascist nineteenth- century patriarchal mind-set. You've made the victim into an accomplice to quiet your sense of guilt." " p oor thing," Lili says, lying in bed. Referring not to Ida but to Cate- rina. Lili's small body is curled around Orso's large buttocks and back like a cof- fee spoon cradling a large tablespoon, her head against his shoulder and her narrow feet inserted in a complicated